The post Announcing AI Assistants for ArcGIS first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>The future is exciting, and these AI assistants will be progressively released throughout 2024. They are just a few examples of the many generative AI related projects across Esri.
My colleague, Adam Pfister, and I presented at the Esri FedGIS 2024 conference. You can watch the video recording here or read the transcript below which may be easier to read and understand what we’re doing.
Over the past several years, Esri has been adding machine learning and GeoAI to ArcGIS to provide you with advanced spatial analysis capabilities.
Last year, there was a revolutionary shift with the development of Large Language Models, or LLMs, used in Generative AI. These advancements have opened new avenues for interactive, accessible experiences. You might have heard of Microsoft’s CoPilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. These capabilities change how people work by providing creative reasoning and natural language interfaces.
Across Esri, we’ve been exploring new capabilities that use generative AI to automate and accelerate workflows.
It starts by following the WebGIS pattern. Publish your data as services, including high-quality metadata. Use these data services as layers in a map, and use in Applications.
We are developing new “AI Assistants” that extend these Apps which use Agents with specialized training, prompt engineering, and LLM to provide particular skills. These use our Tools to access the live data and services – which is important to ensure that answers are accurate and trustworthy.
We envision generative AI being available across ArcGIS. I’m going to show you a few examples of our research developing AI Assistants into ArcGIS Hub, Survey123, and integrates ArcGIS System.
The city of Washington, DC uses hub to share their data, documents, and apps through a focused catalog that supports constituents, partners, and developers to use in their own decision making. The data can be explored, downloaded, access via APIs, and integrated into configurable apps.
Our research indicated that generative AI could help people more quickly & easily get answers to common questions. We are developing a new Hub AI Assistant that will be integrated into ArcGIS Hub and configurable for your organizations’ sites.
We connected the Hub AI Assistant to DC’s Open Data site so that all responses are using their authoritative, up-to-date data and information. When I moved into the city, my first question was “when is trash day”
Now, people can ask this common question to discover relevant information to explore. They can then find the days specific to their address – let’s see at “check at 800 east capitol st ne”
With generative AI it’s important to ensure the source data are accurate, so the AI Assistant provides links to the data source as well as a map and the geocoded location so the person can verify the information is correct.
You can also ask broader questions like “How many trees are in the city?” The DC Urban Forestry team publishes datasets with each tree, species, size, and health. You can then ask it to create a map of trees nearby our location. And because the AI Assistant is using the live services – when the forestry team plants a new tree, the next time someone asks the question they will see the newest trees.
The Hub AI Assistant answers general questions using the documents, and apps in the city’s Hub. I’m wondering “who can help me plant a tree”. There is a simple response and link to the hub page with more information. This helps people understand policies and procedures alongside data exploration.
This is an exciting future and you’ve probably already done the hard work by publishing your data as services and adding terrific metadata that the AI Assistants will include in their reasoning. It’s important to realize that the use of your data in generative AI is happening already and accelerating. We are mitigating the risks by limiting inputs to your curated data and configurable guardrails. There is a lot of work to do here, and we’re being careful about how to respond to conversations outside the scope of the assistant.
For example, someone may say “my house is on fire”. The AI Assistant limits its reasoning and information to the curated data and clearly states when a question is outside of its scope. In this case – call emergency services using 911.
The AI Assistant also helps ensure everyone has easy access to the data using their native language. Parents want to know where their child should attend school, “¿Cuáles son las escuelas cerca del círculo DuPont?” The AI Assistant translates questions to query the data and find the best answer. Then it responds in the language the person asked.
Survey123 is a powerful capability for creating dynamic forms to gather information. However, researching and formulating questions and answers can take significant time. Then we need to configure the form with all the details.
The upcoming Survey123 Assistant accelerates your work. We can request it to “create a survey for reporting damage assessments due to flooding”. The Survey123 Assistant creates a draft survey based on training using domain knowledge relevant to the request and prompt engineering for best practices. Within a few seconds we have a suggested set of questions and answers.
We can modify this to “add a map for marking the location”. The assistant will consider my request, update the questions and answers, then provide a complete draft for me to review.
When we’re satisfied with this draft the Survey123 Assistant can Generate the form automatically. Now we can continue working in the form editor to make changes, share with colleagues and publish when we’re confident.
These are just two examples of our research and development efforts integrating generative AI into new AI Assistants.
We are testing these AI Assistants for ArcGIS with different users and organizations to progressively improve their quality, utility, and accessibility.
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]]>The post Back to Baltimore for FOSS4G first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>Sessions ranged from long-standing projects like QGIS, Open Layers, and PostGIS to newer technology and work
To track all of the evolving technology, Robert Cheetham (of Azavea, now at Element84) shared a tremendously useful “Geospatial Technology Radar” that his team compiled over the past 6-months. Modeled on ThoughtWorks’ long-standing Technology Radar, this geospatial lens provides a good overview of the best and emerging platforms, standards, data, and processes for you to check out.
I presented on the Koop.js open-source geospatial API adapter project. Koop.js is used in various products across Esri, governments, and other technology platforms to dynamically query various API into common formats. For example, you can have an OGC Features API for GeoJSON from GithHub, ArcGIS Feature Layers, Elastic, Snowflake DB, and even consumer platforms like Yelp, Craigslist, or Zillow. There is an active community of Koop.js plugins that can be mixed and matched together.
I’m particularly proud of the support Esri has provided to the open-source communities over the past decade. There are now over 600 open-source Esri supported projects on GitHub. We also document and support integration with OpenLayers, Leaflet, Cesium, and MapLibre (née Mapbox GL). A few of my colleagues, Courtney Yatteau and George Owen, presented an “Open Source Mapping Library Shootout” which highlighted the relative feature capabilities and performance across these community maintained libraries.
In the closing Keynote, Paul Ramsey highlighted that Esri has steadfastly remained a monetary contributor to core open-source projects such as GDAL. It’s imperative that organizations support these open-source projects to ensure proper maintenance, high quality, and fixing security issues.
There were numerous compelling presentations, ranging between project specific details, applied use cases, and community standards + processes. The recordings will be posted here.
A few highlights to check out:
There were many other terrific talks, topics, and people. I’m eager to see how these projects grow, integrate, and are applied to support complex problems.
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]]>The post GeoAI and the Future of Mapping first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>My primary premise is that AI is not New – but that AI has become a lot easier to use. It will be rapidly integrated across all technologies and workflows to automated and accelerate work.
Newer generative AI improves accessibility by allowing natural language interfaces to any machine – without need for coding or concern for particular standards.
AI systems will be composed of various components that are orchestrated to use specialized knowledge and appropriate data.
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]]>The post The Hidden Costs of Daylight Saving Time first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>In 1784, Benjamin Franklin suggested that Parisians change their sleep schedules to save candles and lamp oil. However, Daylight Saving Time is a relatively new invention. The Germans originally devised Daylight Saving Time (DST) in 1916 in an effort to conserve energy during World War I. The U.S. formally adopted the Uniform Time Act in 1966, though States retain the ability to opt-out (e.g. Arizona and Hawaii).
Even more confusing is that DST, like Timezones, varies across the world by country and administrations. There are currently 13 different daylight saving time definitions, including Lord Howe Island, Australia that varies by just 30 minutes!
In 2005, Congress extended DST by 4-weeks. Ostensibly to conserve energy. But since the shift was from the last Sunday in October to the first Sunday in November, it is widely assumed that “Big Candy” lobbied for more Halloween “trick-or-treat” time and therefore more candy sales.
The U.S. Department of Energy reported in 2008 that the additional weeks of DST saved 1.3 Tera Watt-hours of electricity, approximately 0.03% of the national electricity usage in an entire year. The total cost saved was estimated at $84 million..
These efforts are for the stated goal of reducing costs and increasing happiness. But what if DST is doing the opposite – costing more money and making people miserable. In 2016, research reports estimated that Daylight Saving Time could cost the U.S. between $430 million to $1.7 billion per year due to lost productivity, physical injury, and other livelihood or productivity setbacks.
Hidden from view are the bugs in software that increasingly are powering, and bringing down, power grids, transportation systems, banks, and governments. However, there are many signals that there is an even higher significant economic and health cost to DST and related time changes.
We likely all know about Y2K which did not cause major issues thanks to planning and updates ahead of this singular event. Now consider that same scenario repeated every few years and across governments. Since 2015, at least 45 U.S. States are considering changing their use of DST – a pending wave of ad-hoc changes that could have significant impact on software reliability.
Engineering aims to build & maintain stable solutions that people can rely upon. Software in particular operates in a various environments that do not always fit a simple model. While this is just part of the responsibility for engineering, when the requirements are constantly changing it can be difficult, and expensive, to ensure things work as expected.
Time is already a complicated domain to develop correct, maintainable software. I once heard about a software engineering interview question that asked developer candidates how they would design and implement an algorithm for a recurring calendar event based on Boston parking signs.
Now consider when the rules of time vary by geographic location, day of the year, and changing policies. This is a ripe condition for both bugs as well as confusing user experiences.
This is compounded because Software doesn’t have physical restrictions. Code needs to work consistently based on static, dynamic, and semantic conditions.
There are emerging, publicly available examples where DST and time changes are causing significant issues. I’ve found a few worth highlighting…
There are likely many more publicly available, and internally confidential, time-related bugs that are not readily disclosed. However, there is continuing evidence where workers, even in life-threatening scenarios, are required to work around bugs with DST.
During Daylight Saving time changes, some medical staff opt for paper records because Healthcare systems can result in deleted records.
Hospital staff have learned to deal with it by taking extra chart notes by hand. ICU Nurses “come to expect that the vitals she enters into the system from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. will be deleted when the clock falls back to 1 a.m. One hour’s worth of electronic record keeping “is gone,” she said.”
Sometimes, people just work around the software bugs. John’s Hopkins Hospital and Cleveland Clinic “enter vitals at 1 a.m. and then when the clock falls back an hour later and they have to enter new vitals, they list them at 1:01 a.m. They leave a note that it’s an hour later, not a minute later.“
To the original point – what is the total cost of Daylight Saving Time changes?
I couldn’t find a summary analysis of the cost due to bugs caused by DST, there are some parallels. Software bugs caused by Y2K was estimated to cost $21 billion in 2002 and the 2005 DST change cost $350 million. Overall, some estimates of overall software bugs exceeds $2 trillion per year.
While not all bugs are caused by DST and time-related issues, as software increasingly powers all of our systems the costs, and related impacts, will continue to grow.
If you want to learn more details about the history and policy implications of Daylight Saving Time then I recommend reading the 2020 Congressional Research Report. Disclaimer: one of the authors is my spouse, so you can imagine the geekiness of our family conversations.
You can also explore Andy Woodruff’s Daylight Saving Time Gripe Assistant Tool and his explanation to evaluate your preferences and personal effects of DST.
https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/details?prodcode=R45208
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]]>The post Highlight Government Hubs at FedGIS 2023 first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>The conference kicks off with a plenary session where organizations highlight their mission and how our technology helps them work together to achieve better outcomes. I find these stories inspiring in the dedication of the people on important problems facing society – from Wildfire response to Climate Change to Humanitarian Response and hundreds of other missions.
In particular to my and my teams’ work, I learned about several examples of ArcGIS Hub to share information and coordinate ad-hoc collaboration. I want to highlight a few, you can watch the videos to hear their stories directly.
The U.S. White House showcased the recently launched Climate Mapping for Resilience and Adaptation (CRMA), a Hub for anyone to understand local climate impacts. Visitors can explore extreme heat, drought, wildfire, flooding, and other hazards.
All of the data are open data with a Developer API, download in common file formats, or explore directly in their Hub.
watch the White House video here.
The Civil Air Patrol received the “Making a Difference Award” for their work coordinating 60,000 volunteers across the country to fly planes, capture imagery and other data, then share it with responders and governments. They publish their information with CAP Geospatial Hub that supports collaboration across Government agencies, volunteers, and partner organizations.
The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture might be the first presenter to carry an axe!
The Fire team manages a NIFC Hub for sharing Open Data that is used during fire responses, mostly from mobile devices, to coordinate response locations, actions, and shelters. They moved from paper maps to digital maps to have the most recent information which saves lives and improves response.
Watch the National Interagency Fire Center video
The U.S. State Department Bureau of Conflict & Stabilization Operations is actively monitoring the invasion of Ukraine. They use several ArcGIS products including ArcGIS Enterprise Sites, the self-hosted version of ArcGIS Hub, to share sensitive information between analysts, governments, and trusted partners to understand and document atrocities and plan reconstruction.
The Conflict Observatory is a publicly accessible part of their Hub for sharing open data and information to raise awareness and influence diplomacy.
Watch the U.S. State Department video
While the Esri Federal GIS conference highlights Federal Agencies, many local and regional governments participate. The State of Georgia showcased how they used Hub to manage their 2022 Election and reporting, and I heard from many other local governments that are growing their Hubs based on local policies.
During a technical session, the city of Washington, D.C. walked through their process to develop a Vision Zero Initiative Hub. Linda Bailey, Vision Zero Director for DC, and Kevin McMaster of SymGeo provided pragmatic examples for quickly building, iterating, and launching a Hub driven by executive mandate, data-driven policies, and effective community engagement. You can read more about the details on their case study.
These were just a few highlights from the conference. You can explore more ArcGIS Hubs from around the world in our Hub gallery.
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]]>The post Civic Council game first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>We developed a “Fantasy Council” game. Anyone can design their own Committees, choosing a Chair, members and government agencies. You can start with the existing council (sans former Council members) or a blank council. The one requirement is the “Committee of the Whole” with the Council Chair-person as the Chair of this committee.
You can read more about the concept on GGWash.
As an added bonus – the game is configurable and could easily be re-used by other municipalities or groups to explore organizational assignments.
The UI is strongly inspired by other “task boards” like Trello and Github projects. Users can drag + drop agencies or members between committees, rename committees, and name their council.
You can save your council for sharing via Email or post to social media site. There is also a simple “treemap” budget visualization that clearly shows the relative financial oversight of each committee chair.
We have a lot more ideas for improvements if we continue with the project. For example,
Like the previous council project, this project is open-source code and was built with Web Components so that it can be embedded within a content management system like GGWash. The project was designed to be re-usable for other councils by loading all data from Spreadsheets including Members, Agencies, and existing Committee composition. It would be easy to re-use this project for any municipality.
For saving + sharing committees this project also required a database and API. I tried to store the entire committee state in the URL but the length exceeded social media sharing limits and looked complicated in emails. The database also allows for future leaderboards and discussions.
The project was fun to explore modern drag and drop in HTML. It has advanced significantly and mostly works except for complex state logic. I also tried three different IaaS cloud hosting providers to automate the API – which was surprisingly difficult. Digital Ocean was easy to start, but lacked documentation, Azure is complex, and finally Amazon AWS worked well though has significant security settings that need configuration to connect the Lambda API and the database.
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]]>The post Understanding Local Elections first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>DC is a fundamentally geographical city. The boundaries are (originally) a 10-mile by 10-mile diamond that was located to balance preferences of northern & southern colonies and also be a close distance to George Washington’s home at Mount Vernon. Our roads are organized in a British-style grid of incrementing letter + number names with crisscrossing French-style roads named for each of the current U.S. States.
Within the City there are 8 Wards, each with approximately 100,000 residents. The Wards are then subdivided into 46 Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANC). And finally, each ANC is subdivided into 345 Single Member Districts (SMD) of approximately 2,000 residents. Combined together every resident has a local neighborhood code like 8C02 (Ward 8, ANC 8C, SMD 8C02).
One aspect that I find remarkable is that while the 8 Ward Councilmembers (and a few At-Large council members) are paid positions, the other 345 SMD representative commissioners are unpaid volunteers! more on that later…
In 2023, thanks to the U.S. decennial census, the neighborhood boundaries are redrawn to improve equitable representation by balancing population and demographics. Every resident might be assigned a new Ward, ANC, and SMD. (Find yours here!) Within these new boundaries are the people who will represent them on broad city-wide policies to hyperlocal residential building permits, business licenses, and individual road changes. While I’d love to believe that every city resident has been involved with their local SMD representative and ANC committees, it is more likely that people are unaware of their current, and upcoming, districts and therefore new representatives.
We all know where we live. We should be able to easily find out information about our government and neighborhoods with just this information. I’m passionate about the potential for everyone to learn and be engaged on topics they care about. This is what I’ve been working on for the past few decades but I’m often surprised with how difficult it is to find out “what’s going on near me?”
What if you could just type in your address and see what’s going on and who represents me?
While you can use Google Maps to find local stores – that doesn’t really tell you what’s going on. If you’re lucky there’s a local Hub that you can find data, similar to Open Data DC.
DC is again a particularly unique part of America. While we are the capital city for the United States, we don’t have U.S. Senators or Congressional Representatives. Residents of the city have a Mayor, a Ward Councilmember, and then our volunteer ANC representative based on our SMD (Single Member District, like 6C04). Because our ANC representatives are unpaid volunteers they have little budget or ability to campaign other than walking door-to-door to meet over 2,000 constituents.
I appreciate and applaud the efforts of my neighbors to take on significant and important work to represent our neighborhood. For the past year I have been a (volunteer) member of my neighborhood Transportation & Public Space Committee (yes, we have TPS reports), so I’ve become more involved in local issues but I’m not ready to run for office.
So, I took the opportunity to collaborate with Greater Greater Washington, a local news organization, to create informative, interactive, and accessible visualizations of their comprehensive candidate surveys. We’ve created a few versions through the summer, including the Mayor’s Primary, Ward Council, and the At-Large Council members. Each of these races are city-wide, so location (within the city) isn’t very relevant. That’s very different with the hyper-local SMD candidates.
You can now search by address or neighborhood district to find local candidate responses. Since these candidates are volunteers they only have their personal budget and time for any campaigning. Creating an accessible tool like this supports all candidates by making it easy for voters to find out more about the candidates.
Unfortunately, not all candidates responded to the survey. That was their decision and it leaves their potential constituents without any information on their positions and priorities. Maybe candidates will still respond and the tool will automatically update with their new responses.
This was a fun project to build as it uses several interesting and new technology standards. The visualization is a web component where software developers can create new HTML elements that work in any webpage or web application framework.
The web component makes it very easy to embed into a website like GGWash – or any other site built with common website editors (WordPress, Drupal, Wix, etc.). You would just add this code to your website:
<dc-election-survey
id="anc"
filename="https://ajturner.github.io/dc-elections/assets/2022_anc.csv"
candidates-files="https://ajturner.github.io/dc-elections/assets/2022_anc_candidates.csv"
format="surveymonkey"
show-filter=true
filter=""
></dc-election-survey>
<script type="module" src="https://ajturner.github.io/dc-elections/build/dc-election.esm.js"></script>
<script nomodule src="https://ajturner.github.io/dc-elections/build/dc-election.js"></script>
<link rel='stylesheet' type='text/css' href='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@esri/calcite-components@1.0.0-next.292/dist/calcite/calcite.css' />
<script type='module' src='https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@esri/hub-components@4.0.0-beta.341/dist/hub-components/hub-components.esm.js'></script>
The web component are like building blocks. They can be used independently or put together into a composition that integrates several components together. You can see an overview of the dc-election visualization components and how they load data:
The entire code project is open-source at https://github.com/ajturner/dc-elections. Feel free to check it out and re-use it. There aren’t currently any tests, and quite a bit of complex logic that emerged as we progressively built the visualizations over time. In future iterations I plan to refactor the project and settle early on a standard format which would simplify a lot of the code.
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]]>The post 10 Year Esri-Versary first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>Working at a startup was exciting, but we were more often fighting for new features, market awareness, and big sales rather than customer collaboration and problem-solving. Personally, I want to feel time spent on my job is positively improving society and our world. Working on hard problems requires a long-term view, and the dedication and consistent focus that takes many years and incremental iterations.
My time at Esri has been a tremendously gratifying experience where I can directly see me and my teams’ work have a positive impact on the world through our users. As a team we meet weekly to demo product updates to one another – but we are most excited when we highlight how people are using these features for their particular work. It’s fun to ship an update to our search interface, but we love seeing how this helps the Missing Children of Canada or the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Now that our software is used by over 10,000 organizations every week we are flabbergasted by the impact of our work.
Esri is 50+ year-old company and our platform is already in-place at most every U.S. government organization, from national agency to small town or non-profit, as well as in 190 countries with local staff residents. The Esri staff working with customers often live in the same community, able to incorporate local values, problems, and often knowledge that spans across municipal administrations. When I visit a city office, I’m often joining a long-term trusted relationship that allows us to focus our discussions on what they can do today and how we can improve the software they will use tomorrow.
We know that we don’t know all the answers up-front. While Esri has a strong opinion that “geography matters”, the company is organized for emergent growth and innovation. Teams are set up to address a problem area and then allowed to independently research and deliver new ideas to solve these problems. The only requirements are that the solutions integrate into the core platform and customers validate it supports their needs. Esri hosts an annual user conference that essentially ensures that all products will be delivered and updated on at least a yearly cycle. This is a nice technique to prevent large, waterfall projects that are overly ambitious and never deliver.
Esri is a highly collaborative culture. Anyone in the company can conceive and share ideas to any other product. The teams are often small, and so it’s typically easy to find the person that works on a particular capability to work with them on incorporating this idea. We’re also collaborative on our we improve our software development practices. In our first week at Esri, we started the new GitHub Org for Esri that now includes over 500 open-source repositories in a wide-range of technologies and resources. Eventually we licensed Github Enterprise and now all our projects are available internally for staff to contribute in various ways.
We’re also responsible for the long view of our work. When governments and other organizations depend on your software, you maintain and support what you build for an extended time. When we’ve argued about adopting a new feature, the conversation is usually hinged around if we believe this particular feature is one we are willing to support for at least 5-10 years.
When we released ArcGIS Open Data in 2014, I vividly recall a member of a US National Agency remarking “This is exactly what I need – if we adopt this as our solution then don’t change your minds in a few years. I need you to be with us for the long-haul”. Now, 8 years later I still periodically see that person and joke with them that we are still supporting and growing for the future.
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]]>The post Engineering for Birds first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>Our local bookshop, East City Books, has a science section that highlighted “What It’s Like To Be a Bird” by the reknowned naturalist David Allen Sibley. The book is a fascinating “How Things Work” on the biological science of birds. Just a few quick facts to whet your appetite:
The post Engineering for Birds first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>The post Charlottesville Data Bootcamp first appeared on High Earth Orbit.
]]>The event hosted about 70 people that varied across disciplines and experience. I met librarians, data scientists, attempted politicians, civic advocates, retirees and quite a few government staff. Each conversation was enlightening, giving me insight into expectations, hopes and creative ideas to use the newly available information, tools, and access to start addressing some key issues.
Charlottesville was ahead of the curve by defining key initiatives guides by strategic goals and measures. And local residents like Nate Day were already providing documentation for other community analysts.
But launching an open data site, and posting strategy are just the table stakes for effective engagement. Hosting an in person event where people can meet, build relationships and hear honest feedback is imperative to making this work real and effective.
Below are the slides and notes from my talk. My hope was that it recognizes the work that is necessary to start opening information from government agencies, while also aspiring to greater collaboration and coordination that engages every person in a city to become a direct supporter of community initiatives.
Charlottesville’s stated goals for their site are to…
I’ve been visiting Charlottesville since I was a child. My father and his siblings attended the University of Virginia, and I followed along as an Aerospace Engineering student building the UVA Solar Powered, Robotic Airship. While at UVA, I met my wife and we were in the Pep Band (when that was allowed) and later married in Charlottesville. Now we bring our own kids to Charlottesville, and one day hope to retire here. So improving the local community is something that I’m personally invested in.
I spent the beginning of my career designing and building spacecraft control systems. This GOCE satellite orbited so low that the fins used aerodynamic drag to keep the spacecraft aligned. The spacecraft measured a highly-precise and accurate gravity fields. But ultimately, only a small number of people had access to the incredible data from this satellite – and that’s unfortunately common across a lot of measurement systems.
I had the fortune to start working with small communities around the world to use this data to address their local needs and opportunities.
In 2015, Pew research study found “65% of Americans in the prior 12 months have used the internet to find data or information pertaining to government.”
Few Americans think governments are very effective in sharing data they collect with the public:
People’s baseline level of trust in government strongly shapes how they view the possible impact of open data and open government initiatives on how government functions.
How can we build Data Driven Citizenship?
Cities are complex systems of interoperating infrastructure: buildings, roads, water & electrical utilities, information systems. We tend to measure and work with this data to understand and how the city was built.
What is often unmeasured is how the city is used. Every moment of every day the city is alive with people in motion – using assets, moving along streets, pumping water. They are making decisions, actions that influence their commute, their day, their lives. And each day is unique – different from the previous and unexpectedly different tomorrow.
And our cities are not just filled with residents. Cities grow in size through commuters, tourists, and resettlers – potentially doubling the number of people during some hours of the day.
Ultimately, everyone has a place they call home. This street, or building or neighborhood is where they make some of the most important decisions in their life. Their largest financial investment, where they fall in love, walk their dog, raise their children, meet with friends – and grow old and pass on. I believe that no one cares more about a neighborhood street than the people who live there. It is ultimately they who are the lifeblood of our cities.
The real role of government is to create a community that residents, visitors, and business people find to be a great place to live, work, and play.
Hyong Yi Assistant City Manager, City of Charlotte
While Every neighborhood is unique, they must act in coordination with one another and the city as a whole. The city is an Ensemble of individual people and streets that cohesively, and coherently comprise the thriving city.
Initiatives are a measurable goal and strategy to improve a particular community need. To be effective, Initiatives require collaboration across government agencies, citizen communities and businesses.
Charlottesville’s Goals:
“We believe providing the data behind our Strategic Plan Goals will allow for better and more informed decision-making, enhance collaboration among City departments, and engage our community in the activities of our organization.”
Vision Zero is a multi-national road traffic safety project which aims to achieve a highway system with no fatalities or serious injuries in road traffic. It started in Sweden and was approved by their parliament in October 1997.
DC Dept of Transportation (DDOT) started with informing the public and sharing data of historic collisions. But this was only the story of where collisions occurred and were reported. What streets were unsafe and had near-hits, or were likely to have a future accident due to poor visibility, too-short crosswalk timings, speeding cars, or lack of protected bike lanes.
DDOT created a public survey where any citizen could report unsafe conditions for pedestrians, bicyclists or motorists. Within the first week they received over 5,000 citizen reports, all of which became an open dataset and also integrated with their 311 service response system.
Now the public could participate in analyzing the historic data, as well as survey data, to answer a few key questions that DDOT needed to know, but didn’t have the internal capacity to answer: where were the most unsafe intersections? Were there trends in accidents by time of day, weather, impact type, or other potential characteristics?
In a few evenings, citizen volunteers whose day jobs were data analytics volunteered to analyze this data to answer these questions and share the results back to the city and advocacy groups. Now the city could prioritize their work orders and infrastructure improvements. Together the city and citizens had a collaborative role to improve the city for everyone.
The government is now supporting a public, digital infrastructure powered by their own enterprise information systems.
StoryMaps are an amazing tool to craft and convey your vision for a better community. Without any coding you can write an immersive story that includes data, maps, videos and other information for compelling narratives to action.
You can quickly design surveys to gather public input, or gather internal metrics on performance and operations.
Spend a few minutes to configure a modern, responsive, and interaction web application with WebApp Builder.
There are over 400 open-source apps, libraries and other developer SDK that work with the Charlottesville open data site. You can do analysis directly in Python and Jupyter notebooks, or in R and other languages. We support open-source tools for map visualization and charting and other info graphics.
MyStreet is an open-source application you can configure to provide residents with a very simple view around their house, business, or other place of interest. When is my trash day and what police district am I located in? You can also update the configuration in realtime if you need to share new information in an emergency or weather event like “is my nearby bus running and are the schools closed?”
We have a new open-source research project called “Sonar”. You can now build ‘chat bots’ for Facebook, Slack, SMS Text and Amazon Alexa that integrate with open data. Citizens can now ask questions of your city through familiar, and accessible, social media or ubiquitous devices instead of having to visit your website.
You’re probably a bit overwhelmed. And maybe a few of you are thinking “I don’t code/design/write, so probably can’t do something with an impact”. Let me tell you a story of an 11-year old kid from a recent hackathon I attended. He has two particular passions in life. His first is history. He loves it. Can’t learn enough about the who/why/what/when of our past. When he’s riding in the back seat of his dad’s car, he sees these white-colored historic markers fly by. When he asks his dad what it said, his father probably didn’t get a chance to read it as he’s driving down the road.
The boy decided he wanted to build an app to address this problem. So he found the historic markers web database, and configured a web app that worked on his laptop and responsive for a mobile screen. He configured the geolocation, and some other displays so that he could see the marker image and read the historic text. Now, whenever he sees one of these markers on the road, his dad hands the boy his phone and he’s able to “Find nearby” and immediately read the fascinating history of where Thelonius Monk was born.
The boy’s other passion is not dying when he walks to and from school every day. There are often many scary intersections he and his friends have to cross, with sunlight or other factors potentially distracting drivers. So he configured a form where his friends and their parents can sign up for a “Walking School Bus”. When they sign up, he setup a walking route optimization analysis to suggest “walking routes” for multiple families, when they should leave and when they are picking up each child at their house. He also created a mobile survey that the parents can use to report dangerous intersections and driving. This data is now being used by the city to evaluate new walking infrastructure and crossing guards for dangerous intersections.
The boy did all of this work in a few hours at the hackathon and presented it to the judges. He won the entire competition.
If an 11-year-old kid can be inspired to solve important problems and accomplish them in a few hours, then so can you.
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